Posted on

Apple’s cooking their own Social Location

Not too surprising to see, and frankly not real yet … 9to5Mac reports on a patent that covers a pending piece of Apple tech to match and enhance the capabilities currently found in Latitude – at least on the surface.  The goodies within the patent seem to indicate that geo-data will be able to extend to both sms and instant messages making it more of a system wide feature.

I’m hoping this leads to a more standard way to handle location data.  Apple seems “good enough” to start as a source for handling this … I just hope it’s not restricted to Apple only things.  That would be a very Nokia-like approach (Friendview anyone?) and one that while successful within it’s own world, would severely limit the opportunity.  On second thought it does actually sound a lot like what’s baked into Nokia Chat Ovi Contacts.

Posted on

Nokia closes FriendView

Just got an email from Nokia Beta Labs stating that FriendView is closing. No word on whether we’ll see this continue at some near future point integrated into maps or whether it’s just dead.

Frendview was an interesting service and for a brief time overlapped with my friends from Jaiku. Of course those friends were also Nokia users which was a hinderance towards Friendview’s broad acceptance compared to Google Latitude.

Google’s considerably more open approach integrated Latitude in Google Maps for Mobile and has made it the default mobile social location service. We’ll see if the Nokia perspective evolves though it seems like the house is still getting putting in order.